21 april 2011

Names of the 40+ MEPs supporting review of the copyright term extension

Yesterday I tabled a request for a renewed referral of the copyright term extension dossier, together with 40 fellow Members of the European Parliament. The purpose is to give the European Parliament a chance to reconsider its decision from April 2009 to extend the copyright term for musical recordings from 50 to 70 years.

In addition, there were other MEPs who contacted us and told us they wanted to sign, but whom we failed to meet up with for practical reasons before we had the 40 signatures necessary, and tabled the request. These included:

nothing changes, not a single Spanish EPP or S&D MEP.
Once again, another confirmation of Wikileaks’ documents suggesting where these MEPs get their orders from.
And the Parliament is supposed to be there representing the interest of citizens? That does not apply to Spain,that’s for sure.
Just a shame :(

David… please consider that, while it may be true that perhaps not one of those Spanish MEP might have signed when asked individually and given the time to make a decision about it… the list was presented AS SOON as 41 MEPS signed. Maybe 80 others would have signed if the list had circulated one more day, we’ll never know. One can imagine that those who got the chance to sign first were the MEPS of the own group (Greens) and those that have an previous bias towards signing showing through their frequent contacts with the promotors of the initiative.

It does not disqualify those that were not easy enough to approach to be given the first chance to be among the signataries so that they did not get an easy chance to be among the 41 first ones.

Even if 50% of Parliament would have shown interest in signing… the document would have been presented as soon as the first 41 had signed. This does not automatically disqualify those that did not make it into the list.

[…] years. I got only one answer, from Green MEP Claude Turmes. As it turned out he kept his promise to signed the request, unfortunately his support was not enough and copyright extension passed the EU Council on […]